AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My dad’s eyebrows fly up to his hairline. He looks confused more than anything else, as if I’ve uttered a foreign word he doesn’t know the meaning of. And he’s right, I have. ‘No’ is a foreign word to him, and it’s my fault.
It ends now.
“This man saved your daughter’s life with his own body,” I tell him. “He and countless others took the bullets that were meant for me, in my place.” My voice wavers, but I go on. “I am going to meet his mom in person. That is what I am going to do.”
And I do it.
…
I find myself on a plane again.
We don’t talk at first, Hector and me. It’s different from the time I was on this same plane with Angel, just two days ago: then, we were silent because we were too tired, too scared, too traumatized. And there were too many unresolved years between us. I didn’t know how to go from being his most hated person on the planet to someone he was begging to stay alive and hugging so hard it hurt. And I didn’t care to, not then.
But this is different.
This is Hector.MyHector.
The last thing I said to him before I took off with Marco was probably as profound and as intimate as the fact that I’d slept poorly that night or that I couldn’t decide what to have for breakfast. He practically carried me naked out of the shower when they wrote that threatening message on the wall, for Pete’s sake. There is nothing I’ve ever hidden from him.
But this… This is big. Andhehid it fromme.
And it is not ok that it should hang between us. So, I grit my teeth, and gather my courage, and talk.
“I think we need to talk about…” I begin speaking at the same time as he turns around, a tortured look on his face, and says:
“I am so sorry, Liv, I don’t know how to live with myself.”
Our voices are a tangle of sorrow, shame and love.
So, that’s a start. It’s awkward as hell and embarrassing and we don’t really know what to do with ourselves, but we power through. We shoulder the mistakes, the secrets and the lies that others have committed, the ones who were supposed to know what to do but don’t, and we go on talking.
And as we talk, we find ourselves.
It’s still us. We’re still Hector and Olivia.
Except that now, we’re more than what we were. We’re more than friends. Neither of us has any idea how to be that: but being friends has always been easy for us. So we start there.
“Did you know?” I ask him. “How much did you know about Marco and… and me?”
“Not much,” he says. “That is to say, I had no idea. I thought he was just your bodyguard. I thought I was so lucky, to be out of the army and have him work close to me. I was in heaven.”
“Do you know who the other sibling is?”
He nods. Opens his mouth.
“No, wait,” I stop him abruptly. I didn’t know I was going to stop him; I thought I wanted to know. And I do, I’m burning with curiosity. The whole Rotten Royals thing, it’s eating me alive. But no, now is not the time. Not like this. “I want them to come to me first,” I say. “Whoever he or she is, I want them to want to tell me themselves, whenever they’re ready.”
I look at him, and he looks back, holding my gaze.
“Are you sure?” Hector asks. He has my dad’s nose, I notice now. My dad’s skin is dark brown, but Hector is white, well, a deep tanned white. But other than that, they share many features.
“No,” I reply.
“Fair enough,” he smiles. “Any other questions?”
“Tell me how much you knew about Marco and his whole… deal.”
Immediately a frown descends on his face. “You mean the plan for your assass—you mean about the plan?” He turns white and stumbles over the word, looking as if he’s going to be sick. I nod. “I never knew that Marco was the one who was given the job. But he did tell two people about the plan to k-kill you. He knew that if anyone found out he’d told, he was a dead man, but now that I look back on it, I see that he acted as if he were dead already. As if it were a done deal. As if his own safety didn’t matter.”
