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“Idiot!” She opens her eyes just to narrow them at me, before she closes them again, and I smile.
“You still haven’t answered me how Isabella happened...” I resume the conversation we were having last night before stopping talking became more interesting.
“And whose fault is that?” She opens only one eye, accusatively, and when my gaze glides all over her body, which I know, under the comforter, to be wearing nothing but a bikini top and shorts, I am obliged to recognize that she has a point.
“You weren’t complaining...” She snorts.
“The condom broke, and I didn’t notice,” she explains and I squeak, sympathetic.
“The one percent...”
“The one percent!”
“And why did you leave home?If your parents are so concerned about appearances, they would never have really kicked you out if you made the same threat you did on your wedding day…” I ask the question that has been circling my mind since the moment I heard Antonella confront her mother.
The timing was awful, but I thought the way she handled the day-care woman was fucking sexy! That was amazing!
“Our deal is still on, you know, right? I talk, you talk...” I roll my eyes, but I nod, agreeing.
“I was too young, Marcos...I won’t use the word child, but I’m sure too young to understand, to accept, that my parents didn’t care about me. Leaving seemed like the best option...I didn’t measure the consequences, I still hadn’t understood that I didn’t think or act for myself anymore...I had no idea how the lack of money would impact me...” She sits, fitting between my body.
I hug hers and support my chin on her shoulder.Antonella’s gaze gets lost in the ocean.Again, the certainty that she’s hiding something from me hits me hard and I wonder, what?
“You did good, Antonella...Isabella is perfect, healthy, happy...” I don’t understand why, but I feel the need to say it, and she laughs a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
“It’s a way of looking at things...”
“But it’s not the way you see things...” Understanding makes me frown.
“Until your shameless proposal, I’d barely seen my daughter, Marcos, for eight months.” She turns to me.As close as we are, it is impossible to miss any nuance of her expression.I see everything.The lines on her forehead, the slight tremors in her nose, the restlessness of her irises. “I’d take her asleep to day-care, and when I picked her up, she was the same way... On weekends, I was always so bogged down in college work that it was an achievement to be able to take two hours to watch a movie with her.”
The disappointment with herself in Antonella’s voice is almost palpable, but it’s not her only way of telling me things other than words.I hear. As if by a slip, her eyes scream what her voice has insisted on hiding from me.
“You’re not a bad mother because of this, Antonella...” Again, a fake smile. I hold her body in my arms, feeling a need to comfort her, to convince her of what seems like an obvious truth to me. I do not understand this feeling, but I obey it.One of my hands meets her cheek, slowly I bring her eyes to mine. “I’m serious! Isabella is lucky.You’ve taken it upon yourself to be all she needs, and yet you’ve never failed!”
Her eyes blink, she looks away, and by the time her face comes back to me, her emotions have already been hidden.
“Careful, Marcos...That way I’ll think you don’t want my head on a spike anymore…” I laugh. She’s really good at running away from subjects that make her uncomfortable.
“I still don’t like your friend, I still don’t like being fooled, Antonella, but I can’t say I don’t understand what you’ve done. And probably the angry fuck helped...” Antonella bursts out laughing, I love the sound.
“It certainly helped me!” I raise my eyebrows.
“Were you angry?” I ask, once again, surprised.I mean, she deceives me, and has the indecency to be angry at my reaction and still be cocky enough to mention it?
“You were acting like a bizarre mix of an ignorant idiot and a child with a temper tantrum!” Turns around, leaving the side of her body in front of me, distorts her face into a tearful grimace and moves her head from one side to the other and says the next words, “Oh, don’t talk to me! I’ve been fooled!” “Oh no, I don’t want to hear your voice! You’re a liar!” “Oh, I’m Marcos the Asshole, I act like an asshole but don’t want to called that!” Her high-pitched voice completes the dramatization and, unable to help myself, I laugh.
“Okay, Antonella!For starters, I definitely don’t talk like that, and I sure as hell didn’t say any of thoseOh’s!”
“In my head, you said!” She brings her cheek closer to my lips, stealing a kiss from me.I play with the tip of my nose on her skin, caressing her jaw and chin. “It’s no use, you won’t distract me!” she warns. “Now it’s your turn!”
“Oh, only you can run away from uncomfortable subjects, then?” Her smiling face turns to me.With her mouth close enough to mine that I can almost taste her, she says:
“One thing I need to say about you, you learn fast!” She blinks an eye, provocative as fuck and go back to looking at the ocean.
“What do you want to know?” I ask, with a smile on my face that completely contradicts my unwillingness to really give her answers, but which I can’t help.
“Why would you get caught twice in the same week, Marcos?” I laugh, even if I don’t find the answer I’m going to give really fun.
