Gabriella has made no more references about Angel to Nini since their argument, and the air has been charged with unsaid recriminations, an enormous elephant in the living room that both of them steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Nini hasn’t told Gabriella’s father anything, either, simply because she’s uncertain how to proceed with this. She wants to believe Gabriella would never be so cruel with Marcus as to reveal what she knows. But she doesn’t want Marcus to take her away from her if he finds out who she’s dating.
It’s selfish, Nini knows, but she can’t help herself.
Bad things happen, but to other people, she tells herself at night, as part of her prayers. And as the days pass, she really starts to believe it.
“Call me if you need me,” are her only words, religiously repeated every day, every moment that Gabriella goes to be with him, which seems to be every moment of the day.
She has yet to bring Angel to her grandmother’s house. And he has yet to take her to any house at all that isn’t his own. His father is in jail. His mother simply isn’t here; he’s never offered an explanation. There are grandparents that he visits, but she hasn’t been invited.
Neither of them is ready to venture out of this delicate balance again. With him, Gabriella often feels like an orphan, ensconced in a world of their making. All her friends who are Angel’s age are fresh out of college, living with their parents or in little untidy apartments. At best they hold jobs on Wall Street or in film, and even when they make six figures, they are just boys, really; boys who depend on other people, not just for money, but for love and comfort.
Angel, as far as she can tell, doesn’t depend on anyone. She has yet to see him ask for advice, has yet to hear him chat on the phone about something that isn’t business.
He lives with Chelita, his childhood nanny, and in his same building, he’s bought a studio for Julio, his head bodyguard, a man who used to work for his father and whose mission in life now is to make sure nothing happens to Angel. “Nada, pero nada,” Chelita tells her one rare afternoon when Gabriella wakes up and finds Angel gone.
For the past three days, since her fight with Nini, Gabriella has spent the early afternoons here, playing the piano alone in the living room while he listens from his bed, taking the music in with his eyes closed, allowing Bach to align his thoughts. Gabriella prefers his listening from afar; his presence makes her self-conscious. But sometimes, he’ll stand silently at the doorway, watching her play, oblivious to him as she hums, slightly out of tune, along with the melody. Singing out loud helps her make the piano sing, too, she explains to him when he asks. He doesn’t quite get the concept, but he hears what she means; under her hands, his piano does sing.
After he goes to work, Gabriella likes to feel his home without him, touching the edges of the tables and the textures of his clothes, meticulously folded in the walk-in closet.
The phone doesn’t ring here like it does constantly at Nini’s, and the first time she sat down to play the piano after he left, the quietness reminded her of the practice rooms of her conservatory days. She automatically started playing her warm-up exercises, hands extended over an octave-long chord, each finger pressing a black key on the inside. The trick, her teacher had taught her, was to isolate each finger in this excruciating position, to enable it to be relaxed even in the most uncomfortable situation. Then, she launches into scales—C major, C minor, C sharp major, C sharp minor—going up the scale with the metronome ticking in her head, the rote of it all soothing in its monotony.
She thinks of other things when she does this—of him, of the way he made love to her today, bunching her skirt around her waist but not taking it off (“so you can smell of me when you’re alone,” he whispered in her ear), of what her father will say when he finds out what’s going on—and she doesn’t hear Chelita quietly placing the tray with coffee and pandebono behind her.
Only the smell of the coffee alerts her to turn around, and she’s surprised and delighted at the offering, because Chelita hasn’t said a word to her since she’s been sleeping in his sheets in the afternoons.
Later, when Angel comes to pick her up, she takes the tray back herself to the kitchen, where she knows Chelita watches TV in the afternoons.
“Gracias,” she says simply. “Estaba delicioso.”
“Con gusto,” Chelita says dryly, barely mustering a nod, but an agreement has been reached. Two days later when she brings the coffee, she sticks around long enough for Gabriella to notice her.
“Can’t you play a real song?” Chelita finally says, frowning.
“You mean something that’s not classical?” answers Gabriella, who had been playing Bach.
“I don’t know,” says Chelita, shrugging. She’s a heavyset woman with a quiet air of injured dignity who is always reading the newspaper with the TV on, tuned to an endless succession of afternoon soap operas. “I mean, like a normal song,” she finally says helplessly.
Gabriella begins to play “Sabor a Mí,” but midstride switches to Arthur Hanlon, whose piano music she knows Chelita hears on TV, the soaring melody lines flowing easily from her fingers.
“Eso sí,” says Chelita, smiling for the first time since Gabriella has met her and nodding emphatically.
“He’s a gringo, like me,” Gabriella says, with a smile, because she loves this music too, the blend of her two worlds. “That’s why our Latin music sounds special.”
Chelita nods politely not fully understanding the parallel or the humor but sticks around until the end of the song, the melancholy lines bringing a sad smile to her face.
“Play another of that Arthur,” she asks her when she’s done. “Please,” she adds, then retreats again to the kitchen. Gabriella hates to be hovered over when she practices, and Chelita has tacitly acknowledged this. Because she has, Gabriella plays songs especially for her, every afternoon before she goes back to Nini’s after Angel goes to work.
When she takes her breaks, they talk, small fragments of conversation that tell Gabriella the essentials: Her son, Giosvanny, who is now in the States, sent to study there with Angel’s father’s money. He has since married and stayed there, a legal resident who regularly sends money to his mother.
“He and Angelito were very close,” she tells her days later. “Like brothers.”
Her other son had died, killed by the guerrillas along with her husband when he was only eight years old. That was when she went to work for Luis Silva, who heard about her through the grapevine of paramilitaries he employed to guard his coca fields.
They spoke about a Doña Chelita, a tough Indian woman who’d managed to shoot five guerrillas before the paras came to the rescue on the day her husband was branded a traitor and shot to death in the fields.
They took her to Luis Silva’s house in Pance, and he hired her as a general helper around the house. She took it upon herself to do two things: cook and jealously guard her own son and Angel. “That poor little boy that no one looked after,” she now says, shaking her head.
“But I thought he was so close to his dad,” Gabriella says, confused.
Chelita snorts derisively.
“That boy,” she says. “That poor little boy,” she repeats. “His father would get drunk, and if Angelito got in the way, he would punish him by sending him to sleep with the dogs in the kennels outside. We would slip him a blanket so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor.”
Gabriella is stunned into silence. She’s never met people who these things happen to. A little boy in a dog kennel. She cannot fathom the thought, so removed from her reality and from the hardness of the man she made love to earlier today that she can’t reconcile the two.
“But… but how old was he?” Indignation, and just a touch of embarrassment—she doesn’t think Angel will appreciate her knowing this—making her stutter.
“I don’t know exactly. Seven, eight?”
“Are you serious? Why did you let it happen? Why couldn’t you take him to your room or something?”
“Ay, señorita Gabriella,” Chelita begins to say, then stops herself, realizing she’s long overstepped her bounds.
“What, Chelita? What happened?” Gabriella asks urgently.
“You just didn’t mess with Don Luis’s orders,” Chelita finally mutters defensively. “Giosvanny went once, even though we all told him not to butt in. He took Angelito to his room and had him sleep in the bed with him. The next day, Don Luis found them and beat them both with his belt. For disobeying his orders, he said, and for behaving like a pair of maricones, sleeping together in the same bed.”
Chelita shakes her head. “Giosvanny tried one more time, but Angelito wouldn’t let him, he was so scared for him. He just took to getting really quiet when his father was in one of those moods, so he wouldn’t notice him. And then one day, when he was about twelve—he grew really tall all of a sudden—he fought back. He said there was no way he was going to sleep with some damn dogs and punched his father in the face. Well, Don Luis was so surprised, he took it. We were hiding in the kitchen, thinking he was really going to beat Angelito up this time. But he didn’t. He laughed. And laughed. He said he had finally turned him into a real man. He said he’d finally learned to stand up for himself. And Don Luis never messed with him again. At least, he never lifted a hand against him anymore.”
Gabriella closes her eyes and tries to see Angel, because there were no family pictures in this house, so different from her own, where frames litter the piano.
Angel, twelve years old, thin—because the way he looks now, he had to have been thin—squinting his eyes like he does when he hits the punching bag that hangs in his room, and swinging at his father’s jaw. A little boy that no one took care of, until he could take care of himself.
“And his mother?” Gabriella asks.
Chelita waves the notion of the mother away dismissively.
“The mother,” she grunts. “The mother was hardly ever there. And she was more scared of Don Luis than we were. That’s what we thought anyway.”
“Why? Did he hit her?” Gabriella asks.
Chelita looks pained. “Ay, niña, don’t ask me these things. It’s hard to know what people do behind closed doors.” She looks away momentarily, at nothing. “Don Luis was good to me. I owe my life to him, so whatever he did, it couldn’t be too bad. Anyway, she had a choice. She could have walked away if she had wanted. And she chose not to, until they sent him to jail.
“Maybe she loved Angel,” Chelita adds, shaking her head sadly. “She just didn’t know how to take care of him. He was like a little pet to her. She would show him off when he looked good, and then when he wasn’t there, or he had a problem, she would simply forget about him. She couldn’t be bothered.”
Chelita abruptly changes the subject. “Anyway, the only time his father really seemed worried about Angelito was when he got sent to jail,” she says. “He was so worried about his only son. Or at least, the only one he knows of.” She chuckles forgivingly. “So he gave him Julio. It’s Julio’s job to make sure nothing happens to Angel. Nada, pero nada. That’s what Don Luis said. That’s why Julio lives here in the building. Julio does it because it’s his duty,” she adds, looking directly at Gabriella. “But I do it because I love him.” Chelita holds Gabriella’s eyes for a moment longer. “Do you know that Angelito never brought a girl to sleep here before?”
Gabriella feels herself blushing as mortification sinks in. She hasn’t been herself, she knows, and she’s forgotten the rules of the game. She’s not spending nights here, not yet, probably never. Here, that wouldn’t be an act of defiance but of spite, and her simmering resentment with Nini can never become that. But she’s treading dangerously close to the rules of propriety. No matter the time of day, you simply don’t screw in someone else’s house when there’s an adult inside, even a maid, because maids talk. Now she learns that the maid is some kind of surrogate mother.
“I’m sorry,” she says finally. “I’m sorry if I’ve done anything to offend you. I didn’t mean to.”
Chelita looks at her blankly, then her expression changes to surprise as Gabriella’s words sink in.
“No, no, señorita,” she says, her eyes widening in alarm, and for the first time since she’s met her, Gabriella hears servitude in her voice. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, looking down at her hands. “It’s just that you’re the first he brings. I just meant, you must be special to him.”
The nanny, Gabriella thinks to herself, getting a grip on who she is and who she should be apologizing to. She is speaking with the nanny. The nanny who loves the man Gabriella loves as if he were her son, who did things for him with a mother’s selflessness. But a nanny, an employee, just the same, who is now babbling apologies for overstepping her bounds.
He’s never allowed anyone to sleep here before. The thought, the specialness of it, makes her smile. But looking at Chelita, she knows that the words weren’t about her. They were about him.
Julio’s job is to make sure nothing happens to Angel, but that, too, is Chelita’s calling. Her words are not a congratulations, but a request.
“Tranquila, Chelita,” she says, gazing at the flat, black eyes steadily. “He’s special to me, too. Conmigo no le pasa nada. Nada, pero nada.”
Chelita smiles her small, tight smile and she picks up the now-empty tray. “Ande pues, play me one more of those Arthur songs I like, and I’ll let you work.”
* * *
She’s always watched the cabalgata. But she’s never ridden in it.
“Eight hours on a horse!” Nini reminded her tersely, when she announced her intentions of riding.
The cabalgata is the kickoff to Cali’s annual fair, seven days of drunken revelry, punctuated by daily bullfights and relentless partying.
If you want to fully experience this fair, you buy season tickets to the bullfights, you dance to the beat of salsa orchestras that play long after the sun is up, and you go to the cabalgata.
You are part of it—one of the nearly seven thousand riders who will trot down this city, from the northern tip to the bullring in the south, the sun beating on your wide-brimmed hat for five hours—or you watch it: one of hundreds of thousands who line the streets to see the horses, to see the riders, to drink, to let loose, because in this brief week, there are few rules or scripts or parameters.
She’s always watched this ride from the sidelines, from the outside looking in. She had been part of Juan Carlos’s posse when they were younger, and they would ride on a flatbed truck, stopping in strategic locations to cheer, chat, and drink with their riding buddies, identifying every rider and every mount along the ten kilometers of this path that neatly crosses the city.
But today, she’s sitting on a horse. Her name is Grace Kelly, but the trainers call her Greiskeli, all one word. She doubts they know for whom she’s named. She is elegant, Gabriella will grant Greiskeli that, a gray Paso Fino horse with a haughty head.
Angel has been giving her instructions on what to do with Greiskeli since the moment she said yes, she would go to the cabalgata with him, and now he reiterates all of the horse’s fine points.
Gabriella shouldn’t, can’t make Greiskeli canter because that will ruin her step, he cautions, for the hundredth time. Greiskeli is a Paso Fino horse; her small, even, quick steps can’t be broken. She can’t try and ride her like a normal horse; she’ll look ridiculous. She must be absolutely relaxed, or the step will kill her back. Gabriella can’t use her crop. She can’t pull on the bit too hard; Greiskeli is very, very sensitive to the bit.
“Angel, why are you letting me ride her if you’re so afraid I’ll damage her, for Christ’s sakes?” she finally asks, exasperated.
“Because she’s my best and most beautiful horse, and I want everyone to look at you on her,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Ah, you want to show me off,” she says smugly, smiling.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” he answers, bringing his horse close enough to touch hers, taking one of her hands away from the reins, bringing it up to his mouth and kissing it, palm up, before returning it to her again.
Gabriella smiles, but almost automatically looks around for her cousin. Juan Carlos can’t be bothered to go anywhere this year; he watches from a single vantage point—either the club downtown or some friend’s house.
She hasn’t seen him today, but then again, from the inside looking out, she feels like she’s part of a massive blob, and in the sidelines she sees a blur that has only twice been interrupted by calls of “Gabriella!”
When she hears the shouts, she looks inquisitively from under her broad-brimmed black hat, trying to discern the faces of her friends, until finally she locates them on balconies or on the ground.
But calls to her are far more sporadic than calls to Angel, and it takes her by surprise, his undeniable popularity.
During their time together, they have rarely left his apartment, save for occasional trips to the farm, which he knows she loves. But mostly he works nights and sleeps days, and his few undisturbed hours are for her and her alone. Sharing has never been part of the equation, and for the first time, she sullenly begins to resent all this implies.
She wonders if this will be the pattern for the remainder of the feria, for the nightly parties, the bullfights where he holds prime seats. She, it sinks in, is his girl; his girl to show off to the world, but on his terms.
He’s been showing her off already.
“This is Gabriella,” he says simply, never adding “mi novia,” my girlfriend, and she’s not sure yet if she would have liked the label or not. In the end, it’s understood, and she takes in the appraising, frank stares, from the guys and the girls, who look her over carefully, who take in her not-yet-siliconed boobs and her curly hair, which she has tied loosely with a red ribbon that matches the red bandanna around her neck.
She isn’t his type at all, they seem to be thinking. A part of her worries that they’re right, that if she didn’t have the appeal of her piano playing to offer him, he might have cut things off already.
But here she is, in the most public of public displays, and she feels gladly defiant when, in a brief stop, he leans over and, with an air of proprietorship, kisses her long and hard, letting the strong anise taste of the aguardiente he’s been drinking trickle down into her mouth.
The crowd is cheering by the time he lets her go, and all of a sudden, she sees everything around her more clearly: the polished black riding boots, the blinding white of the crisp shirts accented by bright red bandannas, the black hats with orange trim, the leather drinking canteens with their red caps, the blue and pink and green polo shirts and tight jeans and cans of beer tossed over beautiful heads of beautiful people while streamers rise into the incandescent blue sky.
That newfound clarity, she would later tell him, might have saved her from falling, because she saw the man—a teenager, really—step from the crowd into the path of the horses, and she took up the reins left slack during her kiss to turn Greiskeli away from him, when he threw the firecrackers at her feet.
The mare reared high on her hind legs, and with the sun shining directly into her upraised face, Gabriella felt as if she were being dropped, weightless, from an infinite height. She clung to the reins even as she felt her feet slipping from her stirrups, her hips sliding from the saddle.
Angel’s hands came down hard on the reins, snatching them from her hands with such force, she had to wear bandages for two days to cover the welts. But his voice, when he spoke to the horse, was gentle, an incantation that calmed her down as quickly as Gabriella had lost control.
She was too stunned to be angry, it had all happened so fast.
Later, when Juan Carlos pressed her for details, she told him honestly that she didn’t know what finally happened. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she did see. That, before giving her back the horse, before even asking how she was, Angel was calling Julio on the walkie-talkie, speaking in that low, measured tone he used to give orders. “Enséñenle a ese hijueputa que no se mete ni con mis caballos ni con mi hembra.”
Tell that son of a bitch he’s not to mess with my horses or my woman, she heard him say tersely, and to her surprise, she felt a small rush of adrenaline. He could indeed teach a lesson, and the notion thrilled her and soothed her sense of impotence.
“Come on,” Angel says now, pressing her to keep moving away from this spot. He doesn’t turn back, but she does, in time to see two of Angel’s bodyguards elbow their way to where her prankster is now obliviously talking with his friends.
“But I didn’t do anything,” she hears him protest in a loud drunken voice.
“Come on, Gabriella!” says Angel, harshly now, when he sees her strain to get a better look, and this time, Gabriella urges Greiskeli on. When she turns back again to look, just a few moments later, the man and Angel’s bodyguards have been swallowed by the crowd. For a second, her eyes lock with those of someone else standing at the edge of the street, a young man who looks confusedly after her, then frantically calls out to someone inside the crowd, pointing at her, at Angel, before someone else pulls him also out of sight.
In the early evening, Angel hosts a party at his father’s house, the house where she first met him. If anything, the terrace upstairs is even more crowded than that first day, as stragglers from the cabalgata arrive in a steady stream throughout the late afternoon and into the night. She knows the faces, but she doesn’t really know the people. In this city that she’s so familiar with, she’s never been deeply involved beyond the close-knit group commandeered by her cousin, and for the first time ever, she feels like a foreigner.
Instead of wandering through the house, this time she finds a corner on the rooftop from where she can watch, undisturbed, the lawn below. The grooms are removing the saddles and stirrups from the arriving horses and loading the animals into boarded-up trucks, which will take them back to the stables tonight. Along the side street, a line of Humvees and SUVs, flanked by bodyguards and drivers, stretches all the way out into the main drag, forcing incoming traffic to slow down and ogle this towering house, lit with tiki torches and strobe lights. Behind her, the valley is dark, save for a smattering of far-flung homes, sprinkled aimlessly into the countryside, because this side of the city is yet to be fully developed. There’s little to see here at night, except the darkness that gradually lightens up until it meets the boundaries of the main highway, almost a mile out in the distance.
She sees again, like a flicker in her mind, the face of the boy who spooked Greiskeli, his friend’s look of confused bewilderment as he was pulled away. If anything were to happen to her, who could Nini turn to? She could lose herself in the darkness tonight, and no one would even blink.
She remembers her first night here, how she danced with Angel.
But no one’s dancing tonight, and she tries to act nonchalant when she finally leaves her spot and wanders aimlessly through the crowd, looking for his company.
“Hey, Gabriella!” a voice calls to her, and Gabriella feels a wave of gratitude sweep over her as one of Angel’s friends—Antonio, or is it Daniel—motions her to join a group sitting around a low table.
“Belleza!” he says good-naturedly, slurring the words, putting his arm around her. “Come, let’s have a toast!”
She sits on the floor beside him, and gamely takes the shot of aguardiente he offers her, downing it in one gulp.
“Bravo!” he cheers loudly. “Bravo!” “Salud!” the others echo, tiny glasses clinking all around.
“One more,” says Daniel/Antonio, serving another round of shots.
“No, no,” says Gabriella, who’s beginning to feel woozy, and worried that she can’t find Angel. “I’ll wait for the next one,” she says placatingly, but really there’s nothing to placate.
Around her, the conversation is meaningless: the horses, the drinks, who wore what, who passed out. She isn’t a part of this group and has nothing to contribute.
When Antonio/Daniel takes out the packet of white powder, pours it directly on the table, and begins to break it down in thin little lines with his American Express Platinum Card, she’s almost relieved at the change of pace, the shift in attention.
Coke has never been her thing. It gets her strung out but somehow dampens her senses, like drinking coffee after twenty-four hours without sleep.
Daniel/Antonio elegantly rolls up a ten thousand peso bill and almost daintily snorts the first line, then a second, before offering the others a pass.
The girls go first, flipping their long, straight hair back as they lean over into the table, the rolled-up bill incongruous in their perfect, surgically enhanced noses, all upturned tips.
When it’s her turn, Gabriella shakes her head no, smiling faintly.
“Come on, belleza,” urges Antonio, because by now, she’s decided that must be his name. “Don’t be such a party pooper!”
Everyone is looking at her expectantly, their expressions tainted with mild amusement and a touch of scorn. They haven’t been altogether friendly to her, but she hasn’t exactly opened up to them, either, and through their eyes she can see what they’re seeing now: a prissy gringa who won’t even do a little line to get on the good foot.
Gabriella takes Antonio’s rolled-up bill and places it against the last line on the plate, and sniffs hard and quickly.
When she lifts her head, she sees Angel looking at her steadily from across the table, his eyes perfectly blank as he takes a cigarette up to his mouth and inhales, then finally smiles slightly, his half-crooked smile, only this time it’s very small.
She almost beckons to him, but he turns around and walks toward the side door beyond the elevator, the door she knows leads to the bedrooms below.
Gabriella is left stupidly holding the rolled-up bill in her hand, the bitter taste of cocaine dripping into her throat.
“And Angel?” she asks Antonio, at a loss as to why he hasn’t joined in.
“Belleza,” he replies with a laugh and exaggerated wink. “You know what they say. You don’t get high on your own supply!”
“Oh,” she says quietly, as the implication sinks in. “Well. I’ll be right back,” she says amiably enough, feeling their eyes on her as she makes her way after him.
She remembers how to get to the library. Their mutual room, she thinks clearly in the middle of her rising panic. If he wants to see her, he’ll be there.
He’s sitting on the couch, his legs spread out before him, a newly lit cigarette in his hand, and for a few moments, she simply stands at the foot of the stairwell, holding on to the balustrade, because she needs something to balance her thoughts on.
“Hi,” she finally says uncertainly, because he’s looking at her appraisingly and she can feel the touch of his disdain reaching her from across the room.
“You know, I don’t do coke?” she says, ending her statement in a question mark—a habit she despises—and running her hand over the books on the shelves. “I—I really hate it as a matter of fact,” she adds, laughing self-deprecatingly. “I always think I’m going to sneeze, like in that Woody Allen movie?”
Angel inhales from his cigarette deeply, then exhales off the side of his mouth as he always does, so the smoke doesn’t touch his face.
“If you hate it so much, why were you doing lines?” he asks in a lazy tone, devoid of emotion.
Gabriella shrugs helplessly. She preferred his outburst in the car, when he screamed at her, to this restrained anger that she’s unwittingly provoked.
“They were your friends; they—they were really insistent,” she says. “It was your house. I was just trying to be nice. I couldn’t find you anywhere!” She is babbling now, she knows, and part of her also knows that there is no reason to apologize, but the mix of coke and alcohol always makes her a bit stupid.
She looks at him with mounting apprehension. She wills him to say something, to acknowledge that she’s there, that just a few hours before she was important and precious and relevant.
“You know,” he says finally, stubbing his cigarette out. “I never thought you were the kind of woman who did what others thought you should do. I thought you were a different sort of person.”
To her horror, Gabriella feels tears welling up in her eyes, feels her lower lip start to tremble. “But I am!” she says anxiously, not yet fully believing the turn the conversation is taking.
“I just did it for you. I did it to please you! Because I thought it would make you happy!”
He stays seated, doesn’t even stand up to acknowledge her.
“You did it to make me happy?” he asks incredulously, looking up at her. “And why would you possibly think that would make me happy?”
Gabriella opens her mouth to answer, then closes it quickly before she can say what she wants to say. He says it instead, speaking the words she’s left unspoken for the past ten days.
“You think because my father is a drug dealer, I would want you to do drugs?” he asks her, very slowly.
“You’ve been inside my house. In my bed! What was it? Were there drugs lying around for you to use? To make me happy?”
Gabriella shakes her head miserably. In her mind she sees his scrupulously neat room, the flowers on the nightstand placed just so, and changed every day.
In his medicine cabinet, all he has is aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.
“I’m running a business here, Gabriella. This isn’t Scarface we’re talking about,” says Angel, who still hasn’t moved an inch. “I need to move around with ten fucking bodyguards. I can’t afford to be high. No one who works for me can. If you’re going to be the exception, I need to know right now.”
She shakes her head. She’s being given the opportunity to end things, to return to her grandmother and her father and the girl she used to be, but it’s the last thing she wants to happen now. He has become indispensable to her, everything she’s never had and she never knew she needed.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and kneels down between his legs and puts her arm around his calf and her head on his knee. “I’m sorry,” she says it again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t say anything to her. Doesn’t touch her, but doesn’t push her away either.
Gabriella presses her head against his legs, breathing in the smell of horses and sweat on his blue jeans.
“My mother did all kinds of things to make my father happy,” he says almost absentmindedly. “She changed her hair, and did her boobs, and I don’t know how many other surgeries. I lost count of all the time she spent at the hospital and the beautician and the beauty salon. And that was always her explanation: ‘I’m doing this to make your father happy.’ And you know what? He was never happy. He despised her. That’s why he fucked everything that moved. Because he despised her insecurities. And I despise that, too, Gabriella. I don’t need anyone to ‘make me happy.’ ” He mimics her words unkindly, his voice rising to match her little plea.
“At least your mother had the guts to go beyond what was expected of her, have you ever thought of that, Gabriella? Maybe she got tired of ‘making people happy,’ and I respect that. It takes balls to do that.”
Gabriella doesn’t say anything for a long time. Her ballsy mother. Even Angel admires her, after what he knows.
“It also takes balls to do the right thing, have you ever thought of that?” she finally answers, her voice muffled against his thigh. “Simply gratifying yourself is not ballsy. It’s selfish. Maybe your mother’s problem wasn’t that she was too busy trying to make your father happy, but that she was too busy to be a good mother to you.”
She looks up at Angel, and in his tightly shut mouth she can see the comment displeases him.
“Okay. Fine,” he says curtly, and surprises her by adding, “you could actually be right, but I don’t give a flying fuck. All I care about at this point is, I don’t want anyone doing shit around me. It’s not my work. And it’s not a lifestyle.”
“Your friend said you didn’t get high on your own supply,” Gabriella says automatically.
Angel grunts; she’s not sure if it’s laughter or ire.
“It’s not his comment to make,” he says dryly, then leans over her, careful not to touch her, and picks up the walkie-talkie he’s left on the table.
“Julio,” he calls.
“Copy,” she hears the crackled response.
“Get everybody out of here,” Angel says in his quiet command voice. “The party’s over.”
“Copy that,” Julio answers evenly. “Should I get the car ready?”
“No,” says Angel, finally looking down at her. “We’re staying awhile.”
Gabriella suddenly lifts her head.
“Angel, Nini will be waiting for me,” she says uncertainly. “You know she doesn’t like me to be out too late.”
Angel looks at her clinically, as if she were Greiskeli at an exhibit.
“If you need to go,” he says evenly, “I’ll arrange for someone to take you. It’s your choice.” He adds, spacing each word, “And, believe me, it’s not about making me happy.”
Gabriella measures the space between them, one moment so close, one moment so far. She’s still not sure why certain things—things she would have thought were inconsequential—make him explode, but his maddening extremes drive her, ever the conciliatory one, to bridge the gaps. It confounds her that his largesse with her goes hand in hand with the unexpected wrath of his judgment. He’s not prone to apologizing, she knows; his little concession of a few moments ago is a grand gesture for him.
Gabriella vacillates. She could leave and placate Nini. She could stay and placate him. Always placating. But she looks at Angel, and underneath his stony exterior sees just the hint of expectation, of—could it be?—yearning.
She silently takes the cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans and dials her grandmother’s house.
“Nini, I’ll be in later, don’t wait up for me,” she says as gently as she can.