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"My father got a job at a factory. My mother cleaned houses. Neither of them spoke English, but they both believed in the American dream. They got the Mexican nightmare instead."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"They became second-class citizens. There was never enough money to pursue any kind of dream. We were looked down on because of the color of our skin and because of our last name. We were good enough to clean houses and work in fields and do all the menial labor that the people with the right color skin didn't want to do, but we weren't allowed to have a slice of that same pie. We became a cliché. A father who lost himself in a bottle every night, a mother who disappeared into her mind more and more, and two kids who didn't have a clue how to survive it all."
"Your father hurt you," I murmured. It was information I already knew, but despite the ugliness of the subject, I needed to hear all of it.
"We didn't talk in our household. For good reason. Our father liked quiet. If Cruz or I disturbed that quiet, we paid for it. I always tried to explain to Cruz that when Dad got home from work, we needed to stay in our rooms. But he was just a little kid and he thought that if he could stop our father from drinking then maybe things would be different. He didn't understand that our father was mean long before the alcohol hit his bloodstream."
"Silence in my house was always a bad sign," I found myself saying.
"What do you mean?" Matias asked.
"Our fathers suffered from the same affliction," I responded.
Matias's arm tightened around me. "He hurt you?"
“Not physically, no.”
"Tell me," Matias insisted.
I hadn't meant the topic to change to me, but I knew that if I wanted Matias to share things about his childhood with me, I would need to do the same. “He’d get lost in his own head when it was quiet. At least that's what I thought, anyway. He'd sit there eating his dinner and then just out of the blue he'd explode. He'd start throwing things and yelling at me and my mom. He didn’t hit me, but the things he said… the names he called me…” I paused because even now I could hear his cruel words.
Matias pressed a kiss to the nape of my neck. It helped me focus on the perfection of the present rather than the pain of the past. “One moment he was quiet and totally normal and the next he was a monster. So I thought that if I could keep him talking, or even just listening, maybe I could stop it from happening. I hated the silence. I feared it. It took me a long time to realize that it didn't matter how much I talked or what I said. Whatever was inside of him needed to come out and he chose for it to come out in the form of cruelty."
"I'm sorry, sweetheart."
"I didn't have to deal with it long," I said. "My parents kicked me out when I was sixteen. My dad caught me kissing a boy who lived a few doors down from us."
"What did you do?"
"Spent a few days on the streets. That's when I met Mac." It wasn’t until I said Mac’s name that I realized what I was doing. "I'm sorry, you probably don't want to hear about him."
I was surprised when Matias rolled me on my back and stroked his thumb over the ring on my finger. "I want to hear everything about you. Mac is part of you. That makes him part of us. I want to know more about the man who holds a piece of your heart."
Matias’s words not only surprised me but moved me too. I felt tears stinging my eyes but managed to hold them back. "He would've liked you," I admitted. "Even though you guys are so very different, you're a lot alike too. He was protective like you. And he had a good heart like you." The tears I'd been trying to stem fell anyway. Matias wiped them away with his fingers.
"He loved you, so he was obviously a very smart man." Matias leaned down and brushed a kiss across my mouth. "Tell me about when you first met him."
Matias lowered himself back down to the bed and positioned us so we were now facing one another. I loved how he kept touching me in various ways.
"Some older kids were hassling me under a bridge. They were trying to roll me for what little money I had on me. Mac stopped them. He told me to go home, but when I told him I couldn't, he arranged to get me into a shelter. He wanted to get Child Protective Services involved, but I wasn't interested in a foster or group home. When I threatened to run away if he called them, he backed off. But he came back to the shelter the following day and told me he had a line on a job for me. It was nothing fancy… just a job sorting mail for this big investment company. But it was enough. I filed for emancipation from my parents and got my GED. Once that happened, I was able to get an apartment and stuff. I didn't see Mac again for a few years. When I ran into him, he didn't even recognize me. I was nineteen and in my second year of college. We started hanging out as friends, but I knew I wanted more. Turned out, he did too. He saved my life. He gave me my life."
