He leans down. His lips graze my ear.
I shudder, goose bumps rising over my skin.
I tip my head up, no longer content to wait for him to kiss me first. In truth, I’ve built up this kiss in my mind since the first moment I met him.
It doesn’t disappoint.
There are kisses, and then there are kisses, and this one rests firmly in the latter category.
“I thought you didn’t believe in rebellions,” I whisper, tearing my mouth away from his, my fingers making quick work of his tie as he shrugs off his coat.
Now that I have the taste of him in my mouth, the feel of his body against me, I am greedy for more.
Nick groans, pulling me closer. “Maybe I just hadn’t found the right one.”
He strokes my nape, his fingers shifting to the buttons at the back of my dress, his knuckles soaring across the exposed bare skin.
I fumble with the buttons down the front of his white dress shirt, removing his tie from his collar, my heart pounding madly, madly, madly with each shudder, each caress.
When you’re a young girl, from the right family, who sits in the wooden pew at Mass each Sunday alongside your parents, inhabiting a society that looks for reasons to cast a proverbial scarlet letter upon you, you’re told to guard your virtue against such wantonness. No one tells you with the right man it can feel like heaven; in the right moment, it can make you feel more powerful than you ever imagined.
No one tells you how truly lovely it can be.
I thought I knew what it was to want, but now, his body above mine, well, now I know what all those men before him only hinted at, the stolen kisses by eager boys paling in comparison to the passion I find in his arms.
Is this love?
Who has time to worry about such things?
At the moment, it is everything, and that’s all that matters.
* * *
• • •
“You’re quiet,” Nick says.
He dabs his cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table, his other arm wrapped around my shoulders. My head rests against his bare chest.
When I remember this moment later, it will be the scent of his cigarettes, his skin warm against mine, the sheets scratchy against my skin, the bright light from the lamp we never got around to turning off that I conjure up. Those will be the colors, sounds, and smells that shape the memory, but what fills it, what fills me now, is how happy I feel, even as I know there will be heartbreak down the road, that I am the villain in this piece for going to bed with an engaged man, that as I once warned Eduardo, the bill always comes due at the end.
And still—I don’t regret a moment we’ve shared.
“I’m happy,” I reply.
“You say it like you’re surprised by the emotion,” he muses.
“I suppose I have a hard time trusting ‘happy.’”
“I can understand that.”
Despite his time spent fighting in the war, I have a hard time imagining he can understand, and at the same time, there are some things I don’t know how to explain, don’t want intruding on this moment.
My body was easy to share; the rest of it more difficult. Ironic, really, when you think of all the times my mother and Magda worried over my virtue, guarding my virginity as though it was the most prized part of me. They worried far less over my heart.
“You’re still afraid,” he says, his tone filled with surprise.
“I am.”
“I would have thought—”
“That if I were afraid of Fidel and his men, I’d stay far away from them?”
“Yes.”
“The only way to stop being afraid of something is to confront it. To take away its power over you.”
“He doesn’t have power over you anymore, though, Beatriz. You’re safe now.”
The earnestness in his voice almost makes me laugh, and for the first time all evening, I feel like the older, wiser one.
“I don’t even know what ‘safe’ means anymore. I was so busy living in a bubble, I didn’t realize how tumultuous the rest of the world was, how badly people wanted to tear down everything we’d built. None of it was real. It was all just a pretty illusion we fooled ourselves into believing. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“So you don’t believe in anything anymore?”
“I believe in myself.”
“Is that why you don’t let anyone close? All those abandoned marriage proposals?”
I shrug.
“Don’t do that. Don’t push me away, too. You can let me in.”
“Can I? What is this if not a fantasy? What good does it do to pretend it is anything else?”
“It doesn’t have to be a fantasy,” he replies. “It could be something more, something real.”
He is a good man. That is a singular quality these days. He is a good man, and one day he will do great things.
So will I.
I roll over, resting my chin on his chest, trailing a finger down his jaw.
“We are both what ambition has made us. Let’s not pretend otherwise. We have our goals, and the paths we are on are set. This is a moment. Nothing more.”
“You don’t want it to be more.”
“It’s not about what I want or what you want. Neither one of us would be content to have our plans derailed, and we don’t fit neatly in each other’s pockets. You have a fiancée out there somewhere.” He flinches. “You can’t afford a scandal. Not now. The election is, what, not even two months away? And I am nothing if not a scandal.”
“You don’t have to be, you know. It’s not too late to back down from this insane arrangement you have with the CIA.”
“It’s not in my nature to back down.”
“Sometimes I forget how young you are.”
I sit up, the sheets dropping to my waist.
“Don’t do that. Don’t discount me because of my age. I am so tired of people telling me I don’t understand the world around me because I am a woman or because I am young.”
“It’s not about your age or gender. I just can’t reconcile the version of you that is smart and logical with this person who seems willing to throw herself into an utterly reckless and risky situation.”
“That’s because you have no idea what it’s like to watch your country fall apart in front of you, and to feel so utterly powerless, so helpless to do anything about it.”