Three months later
I find Stone waiting for me when I get off work. He’s leaned up against his car, like a bald-headed Jake from Sixteen Candles.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, my heart glowing happy at the sight of him.
“I heard you had a good first day back.” He pushes off the car and comes forward to stand right in front of me.
“You heard, but how…?” I start to ask, before breaking off with a knowing, “Slipped somebody a couple of hundys, huh?”
He takes another step forward, staring directly into my eyes. He’s close now. As close as you can get without kissing. “Everybody in North Carolina’s so easy to bribe. Makes my job real easy.”
“And what is your job again?” We’re standing so close, my stomach is doing somersaults, and for some reason I can’t for the life of me remember what he does for a living.
He bites his lip, and the look in his eyes… it makes me feel like I’m the most beautiful girl in the world. Not some weird Haitian-DR hybrid.
“My job is making you happy, mija.” he answers, his voice soft and full of emotion.
Then he leans forward to kiss me. But…
“Wait.” I place a hand on his chest before our lips can touch. “When did you start calling me mija?”
He leans back, and the “you’re so beautiful” look disappears. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not. I’m not being stupid,” I answer. A heavy anxiety replaces the fluttering butterflies in my stomach.
His face has gone cruel now. No, not cruel. Emotionless. Back to its usual setting. He’s no dreamy rom com hero. I remember that now. He’s someone much, much worse.
I take a step back to tell him, “I think there’s something honestly wrong with you. Something I’m not seeing. What are you hiding from me?”
“Don’t be stupid, mija. It’s time to wake up.”
The mija…it bothers me even more than his “don’t be stupid” catchphrase for some reason.
“Why are you calling me mija?”
“Mija, wake up!”
My eyes pop open to find Aunt Mari standing over my bed and shaking me.
“Oh, you’re awake!” she says as if she had nothing to do with me being ripped out of dream land. “I’m making mangu. Come, come get up, so you have enough time to eat a good breakfast before work.”
I glance at my phone charging on the nightstand. It’s six in the morning, but my aunt is already dressed in one of those bodycon dresses that cling to everything you want men to notice and hides everything you don’t. I have never in my life been able to find a dress that does this for my own body, but my aunt has a closet full of them. And of course, she’s also sporting her signature dark red mermaid tresses and full makeup. Aunt Mari is like the “beauty” version of the army. She does more to get pretty before 9am than most people do all day.
“How did you even get in here?” My voice is little more than a sleepy croak as I sit up on one elbow and watch her throw open all the curtains in my room.
I locked the door last night. Just as I had every night since Stone forced me to move into this house.
Not that I think he really wants me like that.
Only in my dreams—which I totally need to stop having. Seriously, what the heck, Subconscious? Not cool!
But locking the door before I go to sleep with the baby in her bedside bassinet, makes me feel, if not safe, at least like I have some control over our current living arrangements. Even if it’s just one tiny little push button lock.
“Tu novio showed me how,” Aunt Mari answers, her brown eyes twinkling as she shatters even that small illusion of control. “It was so easy. He said I could take just any old key and twist it in the lock.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I remind her for the millionth time as Aunt Mari decides to do a clean and bustle around my room like she’s been invited.
“Go take a shower and make up your face. Men like women who put in some effort,” she answers before launching into a noisy all-Spanish sermon about how my generation has forgotten that women need to take care of themselves, and that’s why we can never keep a man.
Luckily Garnet sleeps like a rock. Even with light flooding into the room and Aunt Mari’s sermonizing, she stays peacefully asleep. Which leaves me free to shower and okay, okay Aunt Mari, rub on some foundation and a little mascara. The bare minimum by Aunt Mari’s standards, but I didn’t inherit that Beauty all You Can Beauty gene from my Dominican side of the family.
It’s not like I need to worry about looking pretty right now anyway, I decide right before I wake up my adorable three-month-old by smoothing a hand over her soft black curls. This is all the complication I want or need in my life. I nurse Garnet before putting on my clothes for work.
Too bad the first thing I see when Garnet and I enter the kitchen is the ruthless enforcer who refuses to move out of the house he’s been forcing me to live in for the last few months. Stone’s seated at the round breakfast table and being fussed over by Aunt Mari.
“Isn’t it so nice to have a big, strong man in the house?” Aunt Mari asks as she sets a Los Tres Golpes down in front of the hulking Italian.
No, it isn’t, I think, eyeing his plate filled with fried eggs, fried cheese, fried Dominican salami, and last but not least, mangu, mashed plantains, with sautéed red onions on top. Stone has no right to be here at my breakfast table. Eating all my favorite Dominican breakfast treats. And ugh…looking better than any man with his severely limited emotional capacity should in a linen suit and open-collar shirt.
“Don’t worry, I made you a plate, too, mija,” Aunt Mari says. She sets my own Los Tres Golpes down in front of me and takes Garnet out of my arms, leaving me free to eat.
My mood lightens as I scarf down her delicious food, and I darn near sing a happy hallelujah song, when she replaces my empty plate with a cup of coffee, all while balancing Garnet in one arm like an old pro.
The original plan had been for Aunt Mari to only stay for a few days, but three months later, I find myself not minding that she’s moved herself in with the full blessing of Stone and her six children who brought over all her stuff after church a few Sundays ago.
“Mai’s right. This house is too big for just you and your novio and your baby,” Osner, one of my cousins, called out to me as he and Jhonny, Aunt Mari’s other son, carried in a divan.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I answered, even as I led them to the downstairs room where Aunt Mari had decided she would be staying permanently after talking it over with Stone.
I’d been annoyed then, but I have to admit it’s really working out as I sip my coffee to the soundtrack of Aunt Mari’s crooning to Garnet in nonsense Spanish.
The scene would warm my heart—if not for the hulking presence on the other side of the breakfast table, drinking his own cup of coffee, and scrolling through his phone.
I can’t believe Stone is still here after three months. He still hasn’t found the right threat to make me take his lethal hand in marriage. And he flies back to New York four out of seven days of the week. Yet he’s managed to insinuate himself into every other aspect of my life.
This house has both our names on it. And guess what I can see from the kitchen window…the matching His and Hers Cadillac Escalades he leased, sitting in the driveway.
He also forced an interior designer on me a couple of months ago. “Either work with him, or let him decide, I don’t give a shit. But my kid ain’t growing up in an empty house.”
Despite his weekly four-day absence and his not-ever-going-to-happen status as my husband, he seems hell bent on us pretending we’re one of those normal suburban families. Why?
I have no frickin’ clue. He’s barely here, and as for “his kid,” he has yet to touch his niece, much less establish any kind of connection that could be described as a father-child relationship. He sleeps in the guestroom the few days he’s here, and so far I haven’t had to worry about making nice with him. Other than at meal times, I rarely see him.
Aunt Mari loves him, and always fusses over him when he’s down from New York. But to me, it feels like I’m living with a ghost. A huge, scary ghost, who dresses in expensive suits and only haunts the house on Sunday, Mondays, and Tuesdays.
But somehow I’d ended up working with the interior decorator to furnish our house with a modern mix of Herman Miller and Bernhardt Design furniture, along with some imported pieces from the Dominican Republic and Haiti to keep it from appearing too much like an interior design magazine spread.
So now I’m eating my breakfast in a house that looks exactly like what it is, a home that belongs to the two of us. And after I’m done doing that, I’ll be hopping into the oversized car Stone bought me to drive into the office. Anyone looking at us from the outside would think we were some kind of happy family.
But we’re not. We’re definitely not. Which was why I spent most of my leave applying for jobs in the Dominican Republic, the one place Stone couldn’t easily ramrod his way into my and Garnet’s life. All I need is for one job offer to come through. Just one, and this weird living under the same roof with a man I despise nightmare will be over.
I’ll be able to raise Garnet exactly as I planned. Just me and her. Far away from the Ferraro family and all their nonsense.
Thinking of that possibility brings me some solace as Stone and I drink our coffees in complete silence.
At least it does until we reach the next part of our now usual morning routine.
Stone sets his cup aside and pulls out a small, velvet box. “Here ya go.”
I stoically continue to sip my coffee. Pretending like I can’t hear any evil, can’t see any evil…
Unfortunately, Stone is totally all right with speaking evil. “Stop playing and put it on already. I don’t want you going into the office today without a ring on your finger.”
With that, he pops open the box. As usual, it feels like getting shot point blank right through the heart with his gun when he does this, and the ring he’s trying to make me wear is the bullet. This ring…it’s even more impossible not to look at than Luca Ferraro. French set with a huge princess cut diamond right in the middle. All the carats. It’s basically everything I secretly online shopped for when I thought Rock and I might go the distance. Only super-sized.
As always, my heart stops ticking for a few seconds as I helplessly stare at the exquisite ring Stone’s trying to make me wear. There was a time I wanted the whole nine yards, a ring, a wedding, a man to love me and call me his own. One who I would adore in return. This ring reminds me of those silly dreams and make emotions drum in my throat.
But then I remember who’s doing the offering. No, offering is the wrong word. More like, who’s ordering me to wear his ring, even though I’ve already said, “No way, Jose” to marrying him, like, a million times.
I think there’s something honestly wrong with you. Something I’m not seeing. What are you hiding from me?
The dream lingers, my subconscious tugging at me to open a case file on the emotionless man, commanding me to wear a ring that looks like it costs way more than two months of my salary. Maybe more than I make in an entire year.
But no, no. I’m not going to do that. He isn’t one of my clients. And I refuse to case file him. I mean, how hard did I learn my lesson after doing that with both Rock and Amber? I’m Not Nice Naima now, I remind myself. I’m hard and cold. No more trying to understand anyone the state isn’t paying me to help. No more overextending myself for people who don’t appreciate or want me in their lives.
With those thoughts placed solidly in my mind, I get up from the table, kiss the baby in Aunt Mari’s arms, then head off to my first day of work. Leaving Stone and the gorgeous ring I refuse to accept, much less wear, behind.
But even as I escape the ring gauntlet yet again, it feels like a temporary release. Like I’m the mouse who thinks she has a chance in hell. And Stone’s the lion who’s just biding his time.