AllFreeNovel
Share Us
…
“I’m going back to America,” I tell dad. “Now, today, if possible. I’ll take Hector with me, if he wants to come.
“Absolutely not,” he replies immediately. “I’m not letting you out of my sight again, let alone out of the country. Besides, you can’t go anywhere until this matter is cleared up. Security will never let you out of the palace, let alone Asteria. The implications and the danger are enormous. They haven’t found the assassins yet, nothing is resolved. We’ll tell her to come here.”
I just let him talk, I let him say all he has to say. I listen to him; I wait for him to finish. After a huge lecture, he’s finally spent. I heard what he said—I agreed with most of it.
But something strange happens to me once he’s done. Something that’s long overdue: I find myself. I find my voice.
I open my mouth, and I say:
“No.”
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.
