I could carry on with my modus operandi: maintain the gallery, socialize with the neighbors, and actively contribute to the community. But that didn’t resolve the big what if about Julian, especially since the state of my mind was already questionable. Was Julian legally my son?
Red flags would fly high if I started asking questions. I could find my ass hauled to the nearest prison or drop-kicked over the border. There was one person who had the answers, and it enraged me that I’d have to seek his help. It also scared the hell out of me.
I grasped the gear stick and downshifted, swerving right toward the airport. My conversation with Imelda had lasted a lot longer than the twenty minutes I had to spare. Natalya’s flight had landed forty minutes ago, and that impatient streak that ran through her veins probably had her in a cab on the way to my house. I’d texted her while leaving Casa del sol, asking that she wait. She’d already left a voice message wondering where I was.
I snatched the phone from the center console, and her most recent message flashed.
Turn around. Got a cab.
I swore, tossing the phone on the passenger seat. I’d just passed her. Couldn’t she have waited five more minutes?
There were times during her visits we felt like a married couple. Our schedules slid into place as we navigated around each other throughout the day. We shared meals and chores while juggling the kids’ activities and bickering about each other’s annoying habits. She picked at her teeth with her fingernail and I used the coffee mugs to clean my brushes. I also saved too much crap, stuff she considered trash, like old newspapers and magazines. I looked forward to her visits, loved having her here, and missed her when she was gone. She made me feel like me, whatever that was supposed to feel like. And I hated that I wanted more from her. She wouldn’t move to Puerto Escondido and I’d turned down her invitation to relocate to Hawaii where she’d help raise Julian and Marcus. I haven’t driven farther than the state line since December. Fear of travel is a bitch.
But despite the distance, what we did have in common kept us together.
Natalya had been in the delivery room with me when Raquel flatlined. It had happened so fast. Her blood pressure dropped like an airplane shot out of the sky; then chaos broke loose as we watched what should have been one of the happiest days in our lives careen in a downward spiral. The next thing I knew, the doctor was offering condolences for my loss in the same tone he’d tell patients to stay off their bandaged feet and rest. He grasped my shoulder, nodded once, then left the room. The nurse adjusted my arms around Marcus, and when she was sure I wouldn’t drop him, she mumbled a halfhearted congratulations and followed it with an apology, her eyes darting away. My gaze met Natalya’s over the jet-black hair of my newborn son. Her expression mirrored my stunned disbelief.
Natalya had come for Marcus’s birth and planned to stay a couple of weeks to help with Julian as we adjusted to life with a newborn. Instead, she stayed two months as we adjusted to life without Raquel. We didn’t have experience handling an infant and we blundered our way through feeding schedules and diaper changes, exhausted and grief stricken. Her fierce loyalty kept her home with us and her compassion ensured Julian and I kept an open dialogue about his mother. How did you tell a five-year-old his mother was never coming home? There was no easy way.
But Natalya’s compassionate nature brought her to me the night before she returned home. The boys had long gone to sleep and she had said good night, going to her room. I took a shower, alone with my thoughts, wondering how the hell I was going to single-handedly raise two boys when I had my own head full of problems. I twisted the handle and the water dropped a few dozen degrees when the glass door opened with a gust of cold air. My skin beaded and I pulled in a sharp breath at the feel of her hands on my hips. I turned, the water pelting the back of my head and shoulders.
“What are you—?” The question lodged in my throat. Water drops camouflaged her tears but not the redness and swelling around her eyes. She’d been crying.
For two months Natalya put our needs before her own. She held my young family together and kept us moving forward as we worked through our grief, rarely showing that she was hurting as much as we were. She stared up at me with glassy eyes and damp lips, exposed in more ways than a lack of clothes, and I realized for the past eight weeks, no one had held her.
I grazed my fingers into her hair and squeezed. Her lips parted on a gasp. She hadn’t come to me for reassurance or comfort. This was a moment for raw emotion, where the need to take transcended the desire to give.
My mouth landed hard on hers. The taste of her anguish was as palpable as the ache to feel alive. In a flurry of limbs and hands and mouths, Natalya’s body melded solidly against mine. I groaned, shocked at the possessive sound deep in my throat, and gripped her thighs, lifting her. Her arms and legs coiled around me and I turned, pressing her back to the cold tiles. I slid into her and our eyes locked. Something unspoken passed between us, connecting us in the way that shared loss does. But it wasn’t my deceased wife I saw in the lines of her face or arch of her brow. It wasn’t her I thought of as I started to move. It was all Natalya.
An undeniable emotion surged in me. Holding her close, I slammed into her. We jerked against each other, hard and rough, until our minds and hearts were stripped as bare as our bodies. I eased her down and we leaned into each other. She cried on my shoulder, shaking in my arms, and I kissed her damp hair, the dip in her temple, the curve of her ear. She trailed kisses across my collarbone and down to my rapidly beating heart. Then she left me, cold and naked and bewildered.
Natalya flew home the next morning. Neither of us had the courage to mention the previous night, and she barely made eye contact with me when she kissed Julian and Marcus good-bye. But at the airport, after I retrieved her luggage from the back of the Jeep, after she briefly hugged me and kissed the side of my neck, I grasped her wrist when she started to walk away. I didn’t want her to go. But those weren’t the words that fell from my mouth. She could be pregnant. We hadn’t used protection.
A sad smile touched her lips, and she gave her head a slow shake. “I’ll text when I land.”
She returned to Puerto Escondido several months later and we eased into a comfortable rhythm as though we’d been lifelong friends. After that, she visited several times a year, and we talked on the phone a couple of times a week. We texted almost daily. But I wondered if she ever thought of those moments in the shower when she looked at me. Did she see me or her deceased sister’s husband? Because I sure as hell hadn’t forgotten those fiery minutes, the way her body fit to mine and the throaty gasps she made as I rocked inside her. My name on her lips when she came. The memory sent my pulse thrumming. I should have felt guilty about having sex with my sister-in-law only a couple of months after my wife’s death. But I didn’t. I had to move on, keep pushing forward into the future. What I did feel guilty about was that I couldn’t stop thinking about Natalya in that way. I’d been lusting after her like a horny teenager.
I downshifted to first, pulling to the side of the road, letting a cab pass by on its way to the airport. Then I swerved around and headed home.
Natalya had showered and left for a meeting before I arrived home with Julian and Marcus. We’d finished dinner and Marcus had already been put to bed by the time Natalya wrapped up her meeting. I was picking up after the boys, making my end-of-the-day rounds through the house, when the front door opened.
“Tía Natalya!”
“Julian, I’m so happy to see you.” Natalya sank to her knees. Julian ran into her arms.
Over their heads, I watched the taxi back out of the driveway. A discarded shoe about the size of my palm lay on the porch. Juggling kids’ books, a wooden train, and a lonely flip-flop, I picked up the shoe and turned to Natalya.
“I want to show you a new trick I learned.” Julian took off to the kitchen. I heard the slider open and slam shut.
Natalya rose to her toes and kissed my cheek. “Hi.”
I smiled. “Hi back.”
Copper strands fanned across her face, tangling around her neck. A few caught on her lip. I brushed them aside, knocking her chin with the shoe.
“Ow.”