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“How do you know I’m thinking about anything?”
“Every muscle in your body is tight with tension.”
I’m shocked by how well he knows me in such a short amount of time together. But then again, no one has ever paid closer attention to me—the real me—than he has. “Is it?”
“Uh-huh.”
The next thing I know, I’m on my back, looking up at him gazing down at me with an intense expression on his face.
“Um, hello?”
When he smiles, his entire demeanor changes. “Morning. Why are you so tense?”
“Gee, I wonder.”
“I told you. He’s going to be fine.”
“I’m very, very glad about that, but I still feel sick over it.”
“I know, baby.” He closes his eyes and rests his forehead on mine. “I do, too.” After a full minute of silence, he says, “I saw that you packed to leave.”
“I need to go home today. It’s my day to get everything done before the work week starts again on Tuesday.”
“And there’s nothing I can do to convince you to stay here for a little while longer?”
“I know it’s not what you want me to do, but… I’d really like to go home.”
“Okay, then, we’ll go to your place.”
“You don’t have to come with us.”
“Yes, I do, Sofia. How do you expect me to have a moment of peace knowing you guys are unprotected?”
“And what will you do if they come for me? Put yourself between us and them?”
“Yeah,” he says as if that’s no big deal.
“So your mother will have another son in the hospital, or worse?”
“If you were to stay here until things calm down, then we wouldn’t have to worry about them being able to get at you or me.”
“Except for when I’m at work or driving to work or at the grocery store or the drugstore or Mateo’s school or any of the dozens of other places I am during a given week.”
“Hearing that list sends my anxiety into the red zone.”
“That’s bad, right?”
“Very bad.” He rolls off me onto his back, taking his body heat and the start of a promising erection with him.
I look over at him staring up at the ceiling as if he might find the answers there. His obvious distress hurts me.
“I’ll stay.”
He turns to me. “Really?”
Nodding, I say, “I’m not trying to make this harder on you than it already is.”
On his side now, he puts his hand on my belly. “This, as you put it, is the sweetest thing I’ve ever had in my entire life. The stuff that’s happened outside of this can’t touch us unless we let it. I respect your desire to return to your own home, but the truth is, I can keep you safer here in this gated community. You can get groceries and anything else you need delivered. I can go with you when you take Mateo to school and pick him up. If we reduce the opportunities for them to get at you, we keep you safer until things settle down.”
