Rafa was halfway through unboxing Ellen’s kitchen stuff when her cellphone pinged with an invitation to a video-call with her family. Usually Rafa wouldn’t hesitate to sigh and do as she was told—she saw them rarely outside of these calls—but Ellen was here…
Then Ellen caught sight of it. Her face set into a stubborn mask. She grabbed the box out of Rafa’s hands and told her firmly to accept the invite in the there’s-no-arguing-with-me voice of someone who dearly wished she had her own family to video-call on Saturday afternoons.
Rafa grumbled under her breath, but obediently sat down and started the video-call.
“Rafaela, you would not believe what your brother has done!” her father immediately shouted.
“Teddy?” she asked. “Did he get into another fight at school?”
“Worse,” the man said darkly while the boy seemed to shrink even more where he sat. “He got into a fight inside the chemistry lab, and ended up causing an incident—”
“No one got hurt!” the kid tried.
“Rafaela, do you have a friend over?” her mother interrupted, sounding mortified. “Oh, no. You should have told us—we don’t want to air our family business to strangers! I’m sorry, um. Nice to meet you? Are you a friend of Rafa’s?”
Ellen blinked at Rafa’s phone, surprised at being spoken to.
“Are you… unpacking?” Rafa’s sister asked.
“Is she, like, moving in?” Timmy asked.
“Is that a baby?” her mother asked, distinctly nervous.
“I’m not a baby!” Gabi complained.
Rafa’s brain quickly scanned through all possible responses she could give to this in a timely enough manner that the situation didn’t derail completely and arrived at what felt, at the moment, like a reasonable explanation:
“That’s my girlfriend,” she blurted out.
Silence rung after her pronouncement. Rafa smiled widely, stared at a point slightly to the left of her phone, and affected a firm I-know-what-I’m-doing voice.
“I hadn’t told you guys about her yet!” she said. “But some stuff has been happening—” Both parents’ eyes moved unerringly to Gabriela and widened in a clear are you a fucking mom now way that she thoroughly ignored. “—and she’s moving in with me. Actually, we’re very busy with the unpacking, could we talk later? I’ll talk to you guys later!”
“… all right,” her mother said, eyeing Gabi nervously.
Rafa hung up without waiting for a goodbye.
***
Rafa mechanically grabbed another box to start unpacking because if she did nothing with her hands she would start screaming. Ellen stared at her with an expression she couldn’t parse—she could read what the fuck just happened and why did you lie like that, but they felt muted in face of the blush steadily rising on Ellen’s cheeks.
“I am not your girlfriend,” Ellen said carefully.
“I had to come up with something!” Rafa exploded. “It was going to turn into a whole thing if I didn’t! This makes it more believable that you’d move in out of nowhere and I’m betting it’ll help not only them but your Uncle as well accept that I’m helping you and you’re not, like, leeching off of me or whatever those shitty people will think.”
Ellen made a face like she agreed with the shitty people. “I’m not sure this would make things better or worse with Uncle,” she said. “And won’t your family be angry that you’d, well…” She glanced at Gabi and Rafa filled out her thought: take in a child out of nowhere?
They would. However, Rafa was discovering a lot of new things about herself these days, like the fact that she would bear anything to keep Ellen by her side. Ellen was in her apartment. Rafa would possibly commit crimes, heinous crimes, to keep her there.
“I vote we keep up the ruse,” she said decisively.
“That we’re dating?” Ellen asked, expression pinched. “We’re going to fake-date?”
Rafaela crossed her arms and glared, willing down her own blush. Why couldn’t they say they were dating? Why couldn’t they date? Wait. Fake-date. That was what she meant to think.
“Fine,” Ellen said with a sigh, her blush growing enticingly darker. “This was your idea. Don’t come hating me when it all blows up in our faces.”
“It won’t blow up! And I’d never hate you.”
Ellen smiled at her sadly, like she thought it was nice that Rafaela thought so.
“Man,” Rafa said, staring down at her phone as a thought crossed her mind: “I hope they don’t go tattling to Connor anytime soon.”
“What’s fake-date?” Gabi asked loudly, fed-up with not receiving attention.
***
The next time Rafa went to work, Connor was stand-offish, quiet, and stern. As this was his normal behavior, Rafa sighed with relief that her family hadn’t told him about the whole girlfriend moving in with a child thing and moved on with the day’s work with a clear conscience.
What a fool to let herself be lulled into a sense of security. She really should have seen it coming when lunch time rolled around and Connor marched into the room with a thunderous expression. The man was a master of compartmentalizing and completely devoted to his work—obviously he wasn’t going to scold her during work hours.
“I’m really busy,” Rafa said loudly as soon as she caught sight of his face. “I think I’m going to skip lunch today to keep working—”
“You can’t do that,” Kaya told her.
“Come have lunch with me,” Connor ordered, attempting to turn his eyes into flamethrowers as he stared Rafa down. Rafa stared back right at the wall to his left. “We have something to talk about.”
***
Connor was silent as they walked to the restaurant, picked out their food, paid, and sat down. Rafa picked up her fork and started eating. He continued to simply stare at her. She reached her limit.
“So what do you want to talk about?” she asked from behind gritted teeth.
“Your guardians called me yesterday,” he told her. “They told me they called you and discovered something huge. About your living situation. Of which you informed no one.”
Rafa stared evenly at him. Connor stared back. None of them blinked. Rafa’s eyes started to hurt.
“Yes,” she finally agreed, looking away.
Connor didn’t smile at having won because he didn’t have a soul. “You have a girlfriend, who has a toddler, and they have moved in with you.”
“So?” Rafa said, crossing her arms. “I was going to tell you soon.”
“Soon?” he asked in a tone of voice that made it obvious he knew soon meant within the next year or year and a half, maybe. “Rafaela, what do you think you’re doing? How long will you keep acting like a child?”
The words hit her like knives. Rafa hunched down and glared at him. “What, it’s childish to have a girlfriend?”
“You are young,” he said, the closest to a snap he’d gotten so far. “You must focus on getting your degree. You must secure your future. You’re not even twenty-five. This is not the time to date, much less have that person move in with you, completely disrupting your space and your routines. Much less, Rafaela, when that woman has a toddler. You are not stupid. You know all of this, or you wouldn’t have hidden it from me.”
He looked distinctly disappointed and forbidding, staring down at her with those dark eyes that were the exact same shade as hers. Connor was being an intrusive, condescending asshole, but he was doing it because he, unlike everyone else in her life, actually cared. Despite herself, she felt a small, childish part of her preen at the attention, pleased as a cat.
She sighed and looked down at her cooling plate. He straightened up, knowing he had won.
Anyway, what would she tell him? That even what he knew was a lie?
“So what are you going to do?” he asked her coldly.
“What, you want me to kick her out?” she asked with a scowl. “You don’t even know her. Why don’t you come over for dinner somewhen? You can meet her and the kid too.”
His shoulders relaxed minutely at the invite, as if he’d been waiting for her to involve him.
“All right,” he said, then: “Eat your food. You shouldn’t skip lunch.”
“Right, right,” she muttered, trying to hide how pleased she felt.