Page 8 of Cusp: A Renzo + Lucia Companion

FOUR

Renzo

“Rose, I told you. Did I not tell you?”

“I know, I know.”

His sister said she knew—like she had told him again and again since their last conversation—but he wasn’t sure she did understand a lot of what was going on when it came to Diego. She assumed a lot he realized. Both his sister and her husband decided a lot about what was the case with their younger brother, but Renzo also learned something else the more he talked to Rose about what was happening back in New York.

She didn’t talk to Diego.

Or rather, she didn’t listen.

It was a lot of we want and we think and he should whenever Renzo got Rose down into the nitty-gritty of the problem they thought they had with Diego and his lack of … motivation. The bigger issue was that Diego’s disinterest was probably a symptom of something else, and he didn’t think Rose or her husband understood that at all.

They were too busy trying to make sure Diego could be a responsible adult because his adulthood was right around the corner. Renzo absolutely recognized the whys of it all, but that didn’t mean their seventeen-year-old brother did, could, or even cared.

But given he was in Nevada, Diego wouldn’t be on a flight to him until tomorrow, and Ren had a job to do here before he could get back home and be present in New York … well, for the moment he was stuck dealing with what he could during phone calls. He and Rose made attempt after attempt to come to some solution between the two of them that would allow them to be united in front of Diego when they presented him with some options.

Except that was hard to do when Renzo hadn’t even spoken to his little brother for long enough to get into the topic of what was going on. He respected Rose’s position on encouraging Diego to further his education—or at least, try. He also thought that maybe there was something his brother might want to do, and why couldn’t he have a conversation with Diego about it first before he decided anything else?

Seemed simple enough to him.

“I know—you’ll talk to him,” Rose said in a huff, the noise crackling the speaker of the Bluetooth in his ear. “Sometimes, I just worry about him. That’s all. It’s like he doesn’t hear anything we say most of the time, Ren.”

That had him chuckling. The sound drifted down the empty corridor of The League’s complex, reminding him that all too soon, he needed to end the conversation with Rose to handle business here. Whatever business that was, as the phone call from Cree demanding he—and apparently other team members—come into the complex last minute hadn’t given him a single hint about what was going on.

Except that it was a situation.

Perfect, huh?

“That’s probably the most normal thing about Diego. The fact you worry about him because he’s a teenage boy who doesn’t care to listen to what you have to say.” Coming up to the corner that would take him to Dare’s office, he could already hear the voices starting to filter down the hallway. Renzo decided now was the time to get off the phone. He could deal with Rose another time, and Diego would be there in Nevada with him tomorrow. “Leave him alone—don’t push him about anything. Let me have the next week with him, and I’ll see what I can do about what you want, but also what he wants after graduation, okay?”

“Skateboarding—that’s what he wants. It’s all he ever does. That and carry that damn camera around with him all the time.”

Renzo sighed and resisted the urge to scrub a hand down his face. “And?”

Because people made careers out of that all the damn time if they were ambitious enough to make it work. Why couldn’t Diego do the same, if he really wanted it?

“What if he breaks a leg, Ren? Blows out a damn knee? What will he do then if he can’t get on a skateboard anymore or—”

“What Diego does is more than just skateboarding.”

And it was.

Even Ren knew that.

Someone needed five minutes scrolling down Diego’s social feeds to know the kid was multitalented. Photography. Videography. Editing. He had an eye for art, too, and especially colorful, modern abstracts. Something Ren thanked Rose and his wife, Lucia, for because both women encouraged Diego to be artistic.

“Rose, I gotta go,” Ren said, ten steps from Dare’s office in the complex, “but you’ve got to give Diego a bit of room to breathe here. Had I told you to put your paints away, said they were stupid and wouldn’t ever make you any money … would you have done it?”

“Ren.”

“Would you have done it?”

Rose let out a hard breath. “No, but he’s got a chance to be anything. And—”

“And so we’re going to let him be what he wants to be.”